Panel essay · Ezekiel · November 2–8, 2026 · Rabbi
Written by an AI persona giving a Jewish reading in the voice of a rabbi — not a real rabbi.
A Christian reader usually meets Ezekiel as a book, read front to back. In the synagogue we meet it in pieces, set into the calendar. On Shavuot, the festival of the giving of the Torah, we chant the chariot of chapter 1. On the Sabbath during Passover, the dry bones (37:1–14). On Shabbat Parah, the Sabbath of the red heifer, "I will sprinkle clean water upon you" (36:25). With the Torah portion in which Judah steps up to Joseph, the two sticks of Judah and Joseph (37:15–28). And every day, in the Kedushah, a congregation stands and says what Ezekiel heard as the spirit lifted him: "Blessed be the glory of the LORD from his place" (3:12).
So I will read this week's chapters through the places where Jews have actually lived with them. That means starting with the oddest fact about Ezekiel in rabbinic memory: the sages nearly took it out of circulation.
The Babylonian Talmud says it outright. Rav Yehuda said that one man should be "remembered for good," and his name was Hananiah ben Hezekiah, because "were it not for him, the book of Ezekiel would have been suppressed" (Hagigah 13a; the story also appears in Shabbat 13b). The reason given is that "its words contradicted the words of Torah." The later chapters, Ezekiel's vision of a future temple (chs. 40–48), lay out sacrifices, priestly rules, and festival offerings that do not match the laws of Leviticus and Numbers. So Hananiah went up to his upper room with three hundred jugs of oil, for lamplight and for food, and worked until he had reconciled them. Some problems outlasted him. Of one verse in Ezekiel's temple code, Menachot 45a can only say: "this passage is indeed difficult, and in the future Elijah the prophet will interpret it."
Hagigah 13a gives a second, more frightening reason. A youth reading Ezekiel in his teacher's house came to understand the hashmal, the KJV's "amber" (1:4, 27), and "fire came out of the electrum and burned him." The sages wanted to hide the book. Hananiah answered them: "If this youth happened to be wise, are all people wise enough to understand this book?"
Behind these stories stands a binding law. Mishnah Hagigah 2:1 forbids expounding the Design of the Chariot, maʻaseh merkavah, even to one student, "unless he is wise and understands most matters on his own." Mishnah Megillah 4:10 forbids reading it as a haftarah, but Rabbi Yehuda permitted it, and the Talmud (Megillah 31a) assigns it to Shavuot.
Christian readers usually miss this tension, and it is the key to the tradition. We chant the most dangerous chapter in the Prophets aloud, on the festival of revelation, to everyone in the room, and we are forbidden to explain it. The vision is meant to be heard as awe and kept back as doctrine.
The text of chapter 1 is itself cautious. Read verses 26–28 slowly: "the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man… This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD." Ezekiel never says he saw God. He says he saw the appearance of a likeness of the glory. Every noun is held at a distance by another one.
Rashi (11th c., France) explains the restraint on 1:1: Ezekiel's "visions of God" were a lesser kind of sight, for "all the prophets also saw through a 'dim speculum,' except for our teacher Moses." Ezekiel is not Moses, and Babylon is not Sinai. Rava (Hagigah 13b) is sharper: "All that Ezekiel saw, the prophet Isaiah saw as well," but Ezekiel was like "a villager who saw the king," dazzled by every detail of the palace, while Isaiah was the city dweller who notices only the king. It is a gentle joke at the expense of Scripture's most detailed vision: the details are not the point.
Maimonides (Rambam, 12th c.) turned the chariot into philosophy. In his code, the explanation of the fundamentals of metaphysics "is referred to as Maʻaseh Merkavah" (Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 2:11), and the Guide for the Perplexed opens its third part with a guarded reading of Ezekiel 1 (Part III, Introduction and chs. 1–7). Yet even Rambam fenced the garden. No one should "stroll in the Pardes unless he has filled his belly with bread and meat," and by bread and meat he means "the knowledge of what is permitted and what is forbidden" (Foundations of the Torah 4:13). The chariot is real, and it is for people who already know how to keep the Sabbath.
The Aramaic Targum attributed to Jonathan ben Uzziel explains the puzzling "thirtieth year" of 1:1 as thirty years "from the time Hilkiah the High Priest found the Sefer Torah" in the temple in the days of Josiah (2 Kings 22). Modern scholars have other theories, but notice what the Targum does: it dates the vision of God's glory in exile from the rediscovery of the Torah. That is a Shavuot idea.
Ezekiel 3:12 is the verse Jews know by heart without knowing it is Ezekiel: baruch kevod Adonai mimekomo. In the Kedushah it is paired with Isaiah 6:3, "Holy, holy, holy," and the Posen Library's survey notes that the Tosefta and the Jerusalem Talmud show the two verses said responsively in prayer by the third century.
Think about where the verse was first heard: not in Jerusalem but by a canal in Babylonia. The glory had come to the exiles, and the angels still said "from his place." In the Musaf Kedushah, just before the verse, the angels ask one another where the place of His glory is. They do not know either, so they bless it "from his place," wherever that is. For a people about to spend two and a half millennia away from the temple, the verse became a portable sanctuary.
Chapter 36 is the haftarah of Shabbat Parah, read with Numbers 19, the red heifer whose ashes in water purify one defiled by the dead. The pairing tells you how the rabbis heard 36:25: as the purification the heifer pointed toward, given by God directly. The verse's most famous use closes the Mishnah's tractate on Yom Kippur. Rabbi Akiva says: "How fortunate are you, Israel; before Whom are you purified, and Who purifies you? It is your Father in Heaven," citing Ezekiel 36:25, and then Jeremiah 17:13, which he reads with a pun: "the mikveh of Israel is the LORD." "Just as a ritual bath purifies the impure, so too, the Holy One, Blessed be He, purifies Israel" (Mishnah Yoma 8:9). Just before it, the Mishnah insists that Yom Kippur does not atone for wrongs against another person "until he appeases the other person." The grace of 36:25 comes after the work of repair, not in place of it.
Then 36:26: "I will take away the stony heart." Rashi glosses the "new heart" simply as "an inclination that has been renewed for the better," using the rabbinic language of the yetzer, the human inclination. The Talmud (Sukkah 52a) lists the seven names of the evil inclination in Scripture and notes that "Ezekiel called it stone," citing this verse. The stony heart is not the total depravity of human nature. It is the inclination every person wrestles with, and God promises to soften it.
Here is what Christian readers most often miss. Ezekiel's new heart is not a replacement for the commandments. Read the next verse: "And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them" (36:27). The new spirit is given in order to keep the law, not to supersede it. The heart of flesh is a heart able at last to do the Torah.
As for "not for your sakes… but for mine holy name's sake" (36:22, 32), I don't find it cold. Exile had made God's name a joke among the nations: "These are the people of the LORD, and are gone forth out of his land" (36:20). God's reputation and Israel's fate are tied together; He cannot abandon Israel without abandoning His own name. Later Jewish ethics made profaning and sanctifying the Name a duty of every Jew. In Ezekiel 36 God Himself acts under that rule.
On Passover the haftarah is the dry bones, chosen, the Talmud says, because it portrays redemption from servitude (Megillah 31a). Egypt and the valley are the same story told twice. "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost" (37:11), the exiles say. Around 1878 the poet Naftali Herz Imber wrote a poem whose refrain answered them: od lo avdah tikvatenu, "our hope is not yet lost." The line deliberately reverses Ezekiel, and the poem became "Hatikvah," Israel's national anthem.
Were the bones literal? The rabbis argued about it openly, and Sanhedrin 92b preserves the argument without settling it. Rabbi Eliezer said the dead Ezekiel revived "stood on their feet and recited song to God and died." Rabbi Yehuda said it was "truth and it was a parable." When Rabbi Nehemiah objected that it had to be one or the other, the conclusion was: "In truth, it was a parable." Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili said they went up to the land of Israel, "married wives and fathered sons and daughters." Then Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira "stood on his feet" and said, "I am a descendant of their sons, and these are phylacteries that my father's father left me from them."
I love this page because it refuses the false choice modern readers bring. Chapter 37 interprets itself as national restoration: "these bones are the whole house of Israel" (37:11). Yet the tradition also heard resurrection in it, affirmed in the second blessing of every Amidah. Rabbi Yehuda's "truth, and a parable" is not evasion: the parable is true because the God who restores a nation can restore a body.
In the third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria, the longest continuous panel on the painted walls, at eye level to the right of the Torah niche, shows Ezekiel 37 in sequence: the scattered limbs, the prophet, the bodies standing. A diaspora congregation read the chapter as its own story.
The two sticks are read in the synagogue with the Torah portion Vayigash (Genesis 44:18–47:27), which begins: "Then Judah came near unto him," to Joseph. The pairing is the Jewish interpretation in one gesture: the brothers reconciled in Genesis, their kingdoms, divided after Solomon, reconciled in Ezekiel. Rashi on 37:16 spells it out: the first stick is Judah "and the tribe of Benjamin, who joined him," and the second is "the stick of Ephraim and the remaining nine tribes, which followed Jeroboam, who was of the tribe of Ephraim." The text gives its own explanation in 37:21–22: "they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all."
The Hebrew ʻets means wood, stick, or tree. I know that Latter-day Saint readers find in the stick of Joseph a reference to the Book of Mormon, and that the Church's lesson this week speaks of wooden writing boards. That reading belongs to a tradition with its own additional scripture. I can say only that I know of no classical Jewish interpreter who read the verse as about books, and that Ezekiel's own gloss, right after the sign, is about a divided people and one king. I would ask readers of any tradition to keep 37:22 in view while they read 37:16.
Who is "David my servant" who "shall be king over them" (37:24; cf. 34:23)? David had been dead four centuries. Radak (David Kimhi, 12th–13th c.) answers on 37:24 that the King Messiah "will be called David because he will be of David's seed," or else the verse hints at resurrection; on 34:23 he names the Messiah from David's line outright. Maimonides adds that he will "renew the Davidic dynasty," "build the Temple and gather the dispersed of Israel" (Mishneh Torah, Kings and Wars 11:1). Jewish messianism is Ezekiel 37:21–28 almost line by line: a king from David, a people gathered, a land resettled, a sanctuary "in the midst of them for evermore" (37:26).
Chapter 47 returns us to the temple vision the sages nearly hid. The Tosefta (Sukkah 3:3) explains that a gate of the temple was called the Water Gate because "through it they take the flask of water used for the libation" at Sukkot. Rabbi Eliezer ben Jacob taught that the water dripping from that flask intimates the water that "will in future days come forth from under the threshold of the Temple," and then he walks through Ezekiel 47 verse by verse: to the ankles, to the knees, to the loins, "a river that I could not pass over." The Sukkot water-drawing became a rehearsal of Ezekiel's river, a small flask anticipating the healing of the Dead Sea.
Two details are worth keeping. First, "the miry places thereof and the marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt" (47:11). Even the redeemed land keeps its salt marshes; healing in Ezekiel does not erase everything. Second, the land is divided not only among the twelve tribes but "to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel" (47:22).
The Lord warns Ezekiel about his own audience: "thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice… for they hear thy words, but they do them not" (33:32). That warning hangs over every study guide, this one included. The rabbis fenced the chariot so no one would mistake fascination for faithfulness. The prophet is called ben ʼadam (2:1), simply "human being," a mortal set before the throne and then sent to "a rebellious house" (2:3). The purpose of the merkavah is not the vision. It is the walk to Tel-abib, where Ezekiel "sat where they sat" (3:15), and the commandments that the new heart was given to keep.